“You publish books of poems, other people call you a poet. You live with the idea of poetry, you live with the notion of being a poet and yet the making of verses, the making of words occurs in the edges of your life, in your spare time, in your late nights or early mornings.
I wanted to come at the business of poetry with a grown man’s attention. Not to make it a job, but to try it as a life for a while.”
—Seamus Heaney in an interview with Patrick Garland, Poets on Poetry, 1973, (seen on the wall of the Seamus Heaney Centre)
51° Fahrenheit, Light rain, windy, and cloudy. Seagulls squawking. 12:41pm.
Well, it did snow. But not as I’d hoped it would. There were flurries, on and off for several days, and a constant white glaze on the sidewalks which made walking extremely slow. North Carolina got a respectable amount, so I am a bit jealous. I hear Watauga County is looking quite good, and I am really missing my App Ski Team friends.
My week was more about reading and course preparation than touring, but I managed to see some epic sites; Giant’s Ring, Seamus Heaney Centre, Harland and Wolff’s “Samson & Goliath,” and the Titanic Quarter. The days have been mostly rainy, near freezing. I spent my evenings drawing. Sunday dawned with bright sunshine with streaks of Carolina blue. I almost cried. But what is Belfast in the sun? So, I found a little umbrella and kept walking.
My first walk was to Giant’s Ring. It is a neolithic land formation. NEOLITHIC. It is the oldest human artifact I’ve ever laid eyes on. It predates the pyramids in Egypt. It's located in a natural preserve just a few miles south of the Queen's. I followed the trail beside River Lagan for a few miles, until it turned up hill, and then I got to scramble under a tunnel of overgrown greenery, between two fences of private pastures until finally emerging from the thicket at the top of a hill where there was a little black iron gate. I walked through the gate and up over the round ridge to see a large bowl, roughly the length of a football field in diameter. The sun was going down over one rim. There was a worn path around the rim and another around the bottom of the bowl, where several people were walking dogs. I bisected both circle paths to walk past the cairn in the middle. It was silent except for a few birds and low voices. Just as I started up the other side, a huge white-golden retriever bounded over the facing rim and ran right up for pets. His owner followed a few minutes later, unsurprised that the dog was laid up against my thigh for back rubs. I walked on down the path in the dark, feeling like I'd just been blessed by the good spirit of the forest, or the bestest boy at least.
I checked out an armful of books from the library from an entire section on Irish poetry.
I visited St. Brigid’s, the neighborhood Catholic church in a mostly protestant section of Belfast. It has an interesting history, was bombed several times, intentionally and unintentionally during The Troubles, but stands today, rebuilt and modern. They commissioned art from all over Ireland for the church artifacts. It seems church officials and parishioners have worked hard to bridge the religious divide in the community, often working with other non Catholic churches in the area to stand in alliance for peace.
I walked Titanic Quarter’s Maritime Mile which includes a great view of Harland and Wolff’s huge yellow ship-building cranes dubbed “Samson & Goliath.” They are impressive. I read that the siren when they start to move is very loud and stunning. I’ll put hearing that sound on my to-do list.
I spent most of an afternoon in the Titanic Belfast Experience. I did not think I’d do a "touristy" museum, but it was fantastic. Don’t go looking for artifacts from Titanic, the experience is mostly story-keeping, from the point of view as Belfast-the-city; extremely proud of Titanic's construction, utterly devastated by her loss. There are photos of every step of construction, whole sections describing design, architecture, and physics of the the sister ships, Titanic and Olympic. It is fascinating and mind boggling. A true feat of human ingenuity and engineering. I was taken with the magnitude of just the rivets, the fabrication and installation of which, was a crazy job. They overlapped the metal "skin" and riveted each piece with a five-person team, who marked each completed panel with chalk.
I never considered how the ship builders —who’d worked on this project for years— might have felt after she went down. Near the end of the exhibit there is a wall of names of survivors and those who lost their lives. Titanic Belfast is an experience in stories; story after story of builders, ship workers, travelers, and immigrants. There are audio recordings of survivors telling what it was like that night, and one man said of the starry sky, that it was so clear and bright with no moon, it seemed like all of heaven was visible.
Oh! They do have the violin of Wallace Hartley, the band leader who played as other people loaded life boats, and who eventually went down with the ship. It was given to him as an engagement present by his fiancé, Maria Robinson.
***
Notable meal of the week: Haddock chowder, sourdough bread, and ginger beer at Titanic Belfast.
Literary Connections
The Seamus Heaney Centre is the epicenter of poetry in Belfast. The Belfast Group led to the formation of the Centre and Ciaran Carson, the poet I’m studying, was its first director. The most interesting thing I learned this week is that Carson donated his entire personal library to the Seamus Heaney Centre and the books are in the “small back room,” a place where Carson believed conversations happen and work gets done. Centre coordinator Rachel Brown said that many of the books have interesting inscriptions and ephemera, such as birthday cards and notes stuck in between the pages. The Centre is in process of cataloguing them. Now someone needs to come along and write about it.
The theme this week seemed to be big. Epic. Humans doing the unfathomable. Yet someone thought of it didn't they? Moving earth, moving ships, starting movements, working hard, supporting each other through triumph and tragedy, steadily, working—together. Nothing I saw this week was accomplished alone. It took hoards of people, over many years, for these projects to succeed, it always does. No woman is an island.
I spent all week prepping for classes and meeting new people, all of which have been gracious with their time, and gratuitously offering me help, information, and kindness. On Friday evening, as I sat in my new office at the top of the stairs, at the top of the building, in the eaves of the "old Seamus Heaney Centre," I glanced up at the ceiling window, where the sky was growing dark. The gray clouds slowly cleared to reveal a waxing gibbous moon within the frame, like a moving painting. As I worked, I watched the moon grow bright and move across the sky.
I am so thankful for all of those who worked, still work, so I can be here: To Johnson & Wales University, to my colleagues at JWU Charlotte who are standing in my absence, my new mentors in the School of Arts, English, and Languages at Queen’s U Belfast, the US/UK Fulbright Commissions, and my family—my sincere gratitude for allowing me to live the life of a poet for a while.
Tonight the moon is full. It is cloudy here, so I won't see it. But like the astronomers who spent their sky-viewing-week socked-in at Wildacres, it doesn't matter. I know it's there.
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